beginnings²

Exhibition Dates: Friday, October 29, 2021 - Sunday, December 19, 2021
Gallery Hours: Fridays - Sundays, 12pm-6pm (masks are required and available if needed)

The sudden explosion of crypto art (NFT art) has a parallel relationship with the first artists to explore code and computers to make art. Both were suspect in the eyes of many. Early computer artists because the artworld didn’t understand that code could be a creative medium. Present day NFT art because the ownership is based on a speculative currency and because the creation of that currency involves excessive amounts of energy. Both early computer artists and early crypto artists see themselves as pioneers, the first to investigate their respective new medium. Beginnings² is an exhibition combining early NFT artworks from collection of the Museum of Crypto Art with early computer pen plotter work from the collection of Anne and Michael Spalter.

CURATED BY

George Fifield, Director of Boston Cyberarts

featured artists

arc4g, Collette and Charles J. Bangert, Harold Cohen, Eceertrey, Fractal Encrypt, Jean Pierre Hebert, Jivinci, ilan katin, Kidmograph, Espen Kluge, Manfred Mohr, Frieder Nake, Jon Noorlander, Number41, Fabin Rasheed, thesarahshow, Edward Zajec

about the artists

Arc4g is a digital artist from Saudi Arabia who makes art with the simple goal of giving you something pleasing to look at for a few seconds. Arc’s animations are made with Blender, and he details in this post how his struggle Spinal Muscular Atrophy influences the tools and direction of his artwork.

Colette and Charles J. Bangert (commonly known as Jeffery) are well-known for their works of algorithmic art, which they produced as a couple. Colette was trained as an artist, while her husband studied mathematics, and later, computer science and programming; the two combined their skills to join the ranks of early innovators within the field.

Harold Cohen (1928 –2016) was a British-born artist who was noted as the creator of AARON, a computer program designed to produce art autonomously. His work in the intersection of computer artificial intelligence and art attracted a great deal of attention, leading to exhibitions at many museums, including the Tate Gallery in London, and acquisitions by many others.

Eceertrey is a photographer, 3D render, and conceptual artist living in Boulder, Colorado. He combines different mediums and techniques, typically digitally mixing, innovative landscape photograph, and new rendering techniques, to create “conceptual sculptures.” His body of work aims to emphasize the deep beauty in forgotten and unexplored regions of our cities, our natural landscapes, and even our thoughts and dreams.

FractalEncrypt is a Miami-based Cypherpunk artist infusing software, math, art, tech, and chemistry into biological interfaces. They often examine the earliest political ideologies of cryptocurrency and recreate them with a unique visual language. HIs artwork often expresses the challenges and optimism of blockchain technology, decentralized finance, and radical individualism.

Jean-Pierre Hébert (1939-2021) started as an engineer and was working at IBM in France when wrote his first piece of Fortran in 1959, but it wasn't until 1978 when he could buy a plotter for himself and start producing the intricate plotter drawings, some of which take days to produce. He is a founding member of the Algorists.

Jivinci is an Amsterdam based multimedia artist art director creating NFTs since 2019. He makes art from a socio-political standpoint, often juxtaposing images from antiquity and renaissance painting with emerging blockchain culture.

ilan katin is a Berlin based artist who currently makes non-figurative drawings, occasionally collaborates with musicians doing live visual performances, and sometimes ventures into the creation of installations. He has been involved with the blockchain community since 2018, creating some of the first NFTs across marketplaces and art collectives.

Kidmograph (Gustavo Torres) is an illustrator, motion designer and art director from Argentina.Since 2003, he worked on music videos, live visuals, lyric videos, GIF art and visualizers. His eclectic style approaches different techniques and aesthetics, from 2D hand drawn animations, to 3D scenes and post production. The majority of his career has been focused on the the music /entertainment business with a vast list of international clients.

Espen Kluge is a Norwegian visual artist, composer and designer. His recent works are focused on generative portraiture coded in Javascript. This visual art tends to gravitate towards portraiture where the human face is used as a canvas for exploration and improvisation in code or otherwise. Fascinated with the link between the manipulated experience of reality that he experienced through his illness and the warping of human face on a digital canvas.

Manfred Mohr (b. 1938) was born in Germany but has lived in Barcelona, Paris and presently New York, started as a jazz saxophonist. In 1963, he studied art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris where he met Pierre Barbaud, a pioneer of computer music. His hard edge paintings and growing interest in the structure of cubes and hypercubes (cubes in the 4th, 5th and 6th dimensions) led him to start working with the computer in 1969.

Frieder Nake belongs to the founding fathers of (digital) computer art. He produced his first works in 1963. He first exhibited his drawings at Galerie Wendelin Niedlichin Stuttgart in November 1965. Until 1969, he went through a succession of increasingly complex programs, from machine language to PL/I.

Jon Noorlander is a Swedish multidisciplinary artist working in the creative field for over two decades. His artistic journey began at an early age, surrounded by different art forms stemming from his family. He has gained inspiration for his designs through time spent living and working in Sweden, London, Los Angeles and NYC. His creative force is expressed through print, motion and sculpture that are bold, contemporary and abstract.

Number41 has been a CG artist, programmer, and engineer for 23 years. He led dozens of short features, commercials, music clips, and character workflow R&D across the graphics disciplines. His home is where science and art meet, and CG allows the perfect medium to express his creativity.

Fabin Rasheed is an artist, designer, innovator and technologist working in the intersection of creativity and technology.  His works revolve around exploring different creative expressions through innovative methods touching  topics like society, philosophy and spirituality. His works span a variety of technology like artificial intelligence, AR/VR, gestures, voice, generative arts etc.

Sarah Zucker is an artist based in Los Angeles. Her work merges the gorgeous and grotesque through humor, psychedelia, mysticism, and the interplay of cutting edge + obsolete technologies. She has been in Crypto Art since early 2019. Her GIF art has been viewed over 6.7 billion times on Giphy. She is a Jeopardy! Champion.

Edward Zajec was among the pioneers in the 1960s, and more recently is professor of computer graphics at the School of Art and Design at Syracuse University. His focus has been real-time artworks originating in his paintings, which used repetition and redundancy, then developed with the use of computers from 1968.

about the curator

George Fifield is the founding director of Boston Cyberarts Inc., a nonprofit arts organization, which programs numerous art and technology projects, including Art on the Marquee on a large public LED screen in front of the South Boston Convention Center and running the Boston Cyberarts Gallery in Jamaica Plain. The Boston Cyberarts Festival (1999-2011) was an international biennial Festival of artists working in new technologies involves exhibitions of visual arts; music, dance, and theatrical performances; film and video presentations and symposia throughout Greater Boston. He is an independent curator of New Media with numerous projects here and abroad. For thirteen years until 2006, Fifield was Curator of New Media at the DeCordova Sculpture park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. He was executive co-producer for The Electronic Canvas, an hour-long documentary on the history of the media arts that aired on PBS in 2000. Fifield writes on a variety of media, technology and art topics for numerous publications. In 2006, the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) Boston Chapter honored Fifield with the First Annual Special Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Arts Community. In 2007 the Boston Cyberarts Festival was the recipient of the Commonwealth Award in the category of Creative Economy.